Hacker News Reader

Comment by satisfice | Hacker News Reader

“Everyone doing Python is aware…” No. Neither me, nor anyone I’ve been helping with Python has been aware of type hints.

You can do a lot of productive work with a language without knowing everything about it. It might be safe to say everyone working with Python is aware of indentation, though.

Sometimes the disconnect between what people in the field are doing and what bloggers say is really striking.

View on HN

This is very surprising to me. Type hints have been a feature of Python since 2015. How are you, and everyone you know, unaware of such a large language feature? I'm guessing you (and the "people you've been helping") either don't use Python that much, or literally do not care one single bit about any of the new features that have happened in the past almost decade.

I'm sure such people exist. I'm just surprised to see them on Hacker News.

They might be using Python 2.

Which would be even more surprising

A surprising number of people have never been happy with Python 3 and even say it was a mistake. Whether you hear this attitude probably just depends on who you're around.

If someone is doing that as an informed decision, they would have heard about typing in Python.

You would think, yeah.

A huge portion of python programmers, probably more than any other language, see python (and programming in general) purely as a means to an end, not a craft to be learned. They will happily do the bare minimum of learning required in order to get working code that solves their problem, which probably means emulating a lot of python code without type hints, and not reading documentation if they can help it.

To be clear, I don’t fault these people at all. They probably have other priorities in their work.

I have been using Python for a year. I’ve written about 4000 lines of productive code by now. Before that I’ve been in Perl land for 24 years. Before that I was on the Borland C++ team. Before that I was in the Apple Development Systems Group. Before that I wrote Assembly language.

The answer to the mystery is: I don’t write production code. I write code that supports my testing and data analysis consulting work. There are hundreds of thousands of hackers, data scientists, AI people, DevOps people, etc., who get a lot of value out of programming languages just by using a subset of what they offer. They don’t study them as Zorro studies fencing.

Lots of people in the testing field dabble with Python without becoming experts in it.

It just strikes me, from time to time, how people really into something can lose touch with the majority of humans who are doing similar work.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com